“Children whose curiosity survives parental discipline and who manage to grow up before they blow up are invited to join the Yale faculty. Within the university they go on asking their questions and trying to find the answers ... it is a place where the world's hostility to curiosity can be defied.

Edmund Sears Morgan (b. January 17, 1916, in Minneapolis), an eminent authority on early American history, and is a Professor of History emeritus at Yale University (1955-1986.) He has written many books covering a range of topics in the history of the colonial and Revolutionary periods, using intellectual, social, biographical and political history approaches. The books include Inventing the People: The Rise of Popular Sovereignty in England and America (1988), which won Columbia University's Bancroft Prize in American History in 1989, and American Slavery, American Freedom (1975), which won the Society of American Historians' Francis Parkman Prize, the Southern Historical Association's Charles S. Sydnor Prize and the American Historical Association's Albert J. Beveridge Award. Two of his early books, Birth of the Republic (1956) and The Puritan Dilemma (1958), have for decades been required reading in many undergraduate history courses. He has written biographies of Ezra Stiles, Roger Williams, and Benjamin Franklin